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Roper Gulf fire, 31 October 2017 Roper Gulf

Out · last detection 10 Nov 2017, 04:26 UTC

The fire started on 31 October 2017 in Roper Gulf, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 11 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 20,147 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 606th largest in Northern Territory since 2016 (of 3512 with a page). Number 107 in Australia in 2017, of 862.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Roper Gulf · 2016Roper Gulf · 2025Roper Gulf · 2022Roper Gulf · 2025

Burnt area
20,147ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
11days
31 Oct 2017 – 10 Nov 2017
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
31 Oct
2017
Heat detections
673
in a single hotspot: 160 MW
Danger at start
42
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
728MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 31 Oct10 Nov
10 Nov 2017

How it evolved, day by day

1 Nov 2017 · 735 MW · 48 2 Nov 2017 · 1,137 MW · 140 3 Nov 2017 · 892 MW · 124 4 Nov 2017 · 2,745 MW · 238 5 Nov 2017 · 608 MW · 49 6 Nov 2017 · 180 MW · 26 8 Nov 2017 · 19 MW · 15 9 Nov 2017 · 232 MW · 32 10 Nov 2017 · 7 MW · 1
1 Nov 3 Nov 4 Nov 5 Nov 8 Nov 10 Nov

Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.

The weather it burned in

39°high
46km/h · peak gust
8%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 13.2 mm on 12 Nov.

This area had burned before

34% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 6,890 ha in 2016.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 13% of the area of London (201 km² against 1,583 km²).

London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).

This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.

What happened to each town

  1. Roper Gulf where it started
    20,293 ha reached on 1 Nov
    0.1 %

Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the GWIS perimeter with administrative boundaries. The distance runs from the point marking the centre of each area to the nearest fire: staying a kilometre away does not mean it reached the houses.

People and buildings inside the perimeter

GHSL 2015
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2015, satellite-based estimate).

This is an estimate on 100 m cells, made from satellite imagery and census data: it does not mean that homes burned or that anyone was harmed. The perimeter also contains land that never burned.

Source: Global Human Settlement Layer (GHS-BUILT-S and GHS-POP R2023A), European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), © European Union, CC BY 4.0. Sum inside the perimeter computed by WorldFires. human-settlement.emergency.copernicus.eu

The weather day by day

ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, the standard reference for past weather, and the Canadian Fire Weather Index (the same system Copernicus uses), computed by WorldFires from that data. Days after the fire run until the first rain.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Climate Change Service (ERA5)

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
31 Oct 38.6 °C 27 % 46 km/h 1.1 mm Very high 42
1 Nov 37.1 °C 15 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
2 Nov 36.4 °C 8 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
3 Nov 37.5 °C 15 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
4 Nov 38.3 °C 18 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 60
5 Nov 38.2 °C 25 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
6 Nov 37.6 °C 28 % 32 km/h 0.7 mm Very high 39
7 Nov 36.1 °C 30 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
8 Nov 34.2 °C 18 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
9 Nov 37.4 °C 13 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 59
10 Nov 37.5 °C 27 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
11 Nov after 37.6 °C 27 % 38 km/h 0.2 mm Extreme 51
12 Nov after 34.0 °C 41 % 31 km/h 13.2 mm Low 8

Before and after, from space

Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.

Before · 24 Oct 2017
After · 17 Nov 2017

If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.

Detections table · 673Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
⬇ Download CSV Times in UTC. Each detection is a 375 m pixel: a large fire yields hundreds per pass.
Date and timeSatelliteFRP (MW)LatLon

Other fires nearby

All fires in Australia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Roper Gulf fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 31 October 2017 to 10 November 2017 (11 days). The perimeter dates it from 31 October 2017 to 9 November 2017.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 20,147 hectares (201.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Roper Gulf (20,293 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 38.6 °C, humidity dropped to 8 % and gusts hit 46 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 60, class Extreme.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Australia (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

Where to verify it

A satellite detection is not an official report. Final figures and the fire’s status are published by each country’s emergency service.

Emergency number: 000 · Emergency number and official warnings ›

Satellite cross-check

History of this page · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 9 November 2017 → 10 November 2017.

RSS Changes to this page

Does something look wrong on this page?

This page is built from satellite data and official records, and it sometimes gets things wrong: the wrong dates, the wrong town, two fires merged into one, or something that was not a wildfire at all. If you know this fire first-hand (you live nearby, saw it, fought it or reported on it), tell us what really happened and we will check it.

Report an error
What do you think is wrong?

We will only use your email to reply about this report. Privacy. This is not an emergency service: if there is a fire now, call 000.

How we know this
  • Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery.
  • Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 31 October 2017 to 9 November 2017. 673 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
  • We have not matched this page with any official record.
  • Weather: Copernicus ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, in cells of about 25 km.
  • Built-up area and population come from the JRC Global Human Settlement Layer (epoch 2015, 100 m cells), summed inside the perimeter: an estimate of what was there, not a damage count.

How we build fire pages: methodology ›

Where this data comes from

The perimeter comes from the Copernicus Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS), which rebuilds it from MODIS and VIIRS heat detections and publishes it under CC BY 4.0. It is not measured on imagery as in Europe, so it is an estimate. Heat detections come from the VIIRS sensors aboard Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20, distributed by NASA FIRMS at 375 m resolution. Municipal boundaries come from geoBoundaries ADM2 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)). The area per municipality is computed by WorldFires by crossing the perimeter with those boundaries, so it may differ from each country’s official figure.